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Yoshi hasn’t starred in a good Nintendo game in 30 years — why?
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Yoshi hasn’t starred in a good Nintendo game in 30 years — why?

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What’s the deal with Yoshi? The little dinosaur (who might not be a dinosaur, but let’s not go into that right now) is somehow both a singular character and an entire species. He (they? it?) was introduced as a steed for Mario in Super Mario World, with mostly mechanical characteristics: stretchy tongue, floaty jump, eats stuff and lays eggs. Yoshi never speaks except to squeak his own name. Yet he has become one Nintendo’s most recognizable and beloved characters, to the extent that Donald Glover begged to play him in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. So why isn’t he in more good games?

There’s something innocent and childlike about Yoshi. Nintendo immediately cottoned on to this for Yoshi’s starring role in the magnificent 1995 platform game Super Mario World: Yoshi’s Island. The subject of the game is childhood: It begins with a tinkling music box, it features Mario and Luigi as wailing babies, it looks like it’s been drawn with crayons.

But this was before Nintendo began to draw a distinction between the games it made for little kids and the games it made for everyone. Yoshi’s Island was made by Nintendo’s hottest talent — Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, Hideki Konno, Yoshiaki Koizumi, and Koji Kondo all worked on it — and gave nothing away in scope, quality, or challenge to a Mario or Zelda release. Sadly, Yoshi would never get the same treatment again.

Image: Nintendo

Before Yoshi’s Island, Nintendo had a tendency to slap Yoshi as a random mascot onto whatever it had cooking: puzzle games like Yoshi’s Cookie and Tetris Attack, even a light-gun game in Yoshi’s Safari. After Yoshi’s Island, he was established as a platform game star, but a sense of aimless experimentation lingered around his games, along with a tendency to hand them off to inexperienced or outside development teams.

Yoshi’s Story is one of Nintendo’s least distinguished games of the N64 era. Yoshi’s Universal Gravitation, a Game Boy Advance game with tilt controls, is an underdeveloped gimmick. Yoshi Touch & Go for the DS is more successful: a very influential game on the coming touchscreen revolution, but still on the slender side. There were half-hearted attempts to recapture the Yoshi’s Island magic on DS and 3DS.

Yoshi leaps with a flower on his back in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. Image: Nintendo

When the current Yoshi custodians at developer Good-Feel came on board with Yoshi’s Woolly World in 2015, the emphasis shifted to handcrafted visual treatments and forgiving gameplay for the youngest players. Quality improved, but a sense of truncated ambition remains — and that’s true of new release Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, too, which is formally experimental in interesting ways that don’t pay off. Yoshi is such an easy character to love, but most of his games are easy to feel indifferent about.

Nintendo does better by very young players than almost any other developer. But it can and does still sell this audience short. It’s not that the games are too easy, or ill-conceived. But somewhere in their production, the ideas, attention to detail, care, and maybe money seem to run out. They peter out. I want Yoshi to stay in his role as a Nintendo’s gaming icon for little kids. I just want those kids’ games to be better.

eShop game of the week: Sektori

A colorful abstract battlefield of geometric shapes Image: Kimmo Lahtinen

This abstract twin-stick shooter from former Housemarque dev Kimmo Lathinen channels the techno music, updated vector graphics, and psychedelic effects of Geometry Wars and the work of Jeff Minter. And does it brilliantly, by all accounts — the Switch 2 version currently sits at a mighty 93 on Metacritc.

Nintendo Music track of the week: “Flower Field BGM” from Yoshi’s Island

By 1995’s Yoshi’s Island, legendary Nintendo composer Koji Kondo’s command of the SNES sound chip was total, and he could use it to summon Hammond organs, pan pipes, jugband jazz, or, in this case, a gorgeously plaintive harmonica melody over a sunny, funky shuffle.

Nintendo Classics game of the week: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

In the running for greatest platform game ever made. A riot of hectic physical comedy, joyfully tactile, simultaneously captures the stress of parenting and the “what happens if I eat this?” of toddlerdom. Scruffy sketchbook presentation was decades ahead of its time. Capped Nintendo’s generational run on the SNES with one final masterpiece.

This week’s most interesting releases

Coffee Talk Tokyo

  • Out now
  • Switch, Switch 2
  • Cozy brews and chats in a semi-fantastical setting

King of Tokyo

  • Out now
  • Switch
  • Digital adaptation of Richard Garfield’s classic kaiju board game

Psyvariar 3

  • Out now
  • Switch, Switch 2
  • Vertical shmup action for the shmup heads

Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn Edition

  • May 22
  • Switch 2
  • Definitive edition of the fan-favorite 2021 RPG

Bubsy 4D

  • May 22
  • Switch, Switch 2
  • Self-aware return of the punchline platforming mascot
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